Generally speaking, line of business (“LOB”) applications refer to a class of vertical and often highly customized software applications used primarily in enterprise computing environments to implement business essential and mission-critical corporate functionality. LOB applications provide core functionality in support of the day-to-day operations of a corporation or other form of large organization, such as a hospital, government, university, non-profit organization, and the like. Herein, corporations and corporate need will be mentioned in the context of LOB applications, but these terms should be understood to apply to all forms of organization, corporate or otherwise, whether large or small, that rely on LOB applications to fulfill an internal computer automation business need.
Programmatically, LOB applications implement the rules and policies, organizational workflow and operations, and business heuristics that together define the crucial backbone operations that are used internally by various departments within an organization, such as human resources, corporate relations, sales, marketing, and production, although LOB applications could also provide other kinds of less critical or non-core functionality.
When adapting and customizing enterprise platform solutions for a corporate customer, business needs are generally translated into separate LOB applications that vertically align with each specific business need, but not necessarily with providing functionality for the business needs of other departments within the corporation. As a result, access to each type of LOB application has historically been limited to those employees working within the functional area of the department from which the business need originated. For instance, a human resources (HR) department would typically be charged with control over those LOB applications concerning payroll, benefits, vacation, recruiting, and the like. Personnel in other departments outside of HR would not ordinarily have access to the HR department's LOB applications.
While restricting access ensures only authorized use of a vertical LOB application by the originating department's employees, other personnel outside of a responsible department's immediate staff may also have legitimate business reasons for wanting to access another department's LOB application, albeit in a possibly more limited or restricted fashion. Conventional approaches to providing limited access to employees and other personnel who are outside of a responsible department has ordinarily required implementing a separate programmatic interface into the LOB application. For instance, separate interfaces might be needed to provide restricted access to an HR department's LOB application for employees in the corporate relations, sales, and marketing departments. The utility of providing a separate interface to each outside department can be outweighed by cost and complexity, yet denying personnel in outside departments access to other departments' LOB applications forces those employees to resort to less efficient means of interoperating and conducting corporate affairs, including undertaking manual workflow.
Therefore, a need remains for providing flexible interfaces to LOB applications to meet the divergent interests of personnel in different departments, as well as other authorized individuals, within a corporate enterprise.